Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Gelf Magazine's motto is "Looking Over the Overlooked". Qualification enough for their recent piece Youth Literature Is Full of Scrotums, it seems. It's a response to the librarian quotedin the recent New York Times article who sniffed that scrotums have no place in children's literature. Trust Gelf to prove her wrong.

Now calling some of these books "Youth Literature" comes as a bit of a stretch, but I admire their tenacity. A box of chocolates to the poor intern who must have been despatched to the local library to scout out any and all books in which that word might appear (and for the librarian who would have helped).

5 Comments:

Thanks for pointing us to the Gelf post! Very amusing. The James Herriot thing had occurred to me too. One of my commenters recalled reading a copy of Peck's A DAY NO PIGS WOULD DIE in which the school librarian had crossed out the word "bitch" in a line of the father's dialogue and written "female dog" in the margin. The father was talking about his dog, of course. Sigh.

"Many of the suggestions are really quite simple, like breaking down cardboard boxes or sewing cushions to couches so they cannot be converted into forts or playhouses," McMillan said. "Blank pieces of paper, which can inspire non-reality-based drawings, should be discarded unless they are used in one of our recommended diagonal folding and unfolding activities. And all loose sticks left lying in the yard should be carefully labeled 'Not a Sword.'"

My thoughts on this controversy lean towards wondering why there's so much concern about the mention of a bit of anatomy (which at least some of the readers actually will have themselves, particularly when it's mentioned with an acceptable medical nomenclature, vs a crass slang term. Are there really kids who are going to read this that don't know there's a difference between girl parts and boy parts?